


Power/Play

by twistedchick



Series: Identity [8]
Category: The Sentinel
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-17
Updated: 2009-11-17
Packaged: 2017-10-03 04:26:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twistedchick/pseuds/twistedchick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blair's interrogation skills upset Jim's senses.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Power/Play

I can't fucking believe it.

It's one thing when I screw up and Simon calls me into his office, shuts the door, and takes me apart limb from limb for as long as he wants. I expect that. If Simon didn't crack down on Jim and me when we mess up, he wouldn't be doing his job. He goes overboard sometimes to cut us a break, and the fact that he cracks down on us harder than on anyone else in Major Crime makes the favors a bit more bearable for everyone else.

So I can deal with having Captain Simon Banks tear me a new one, when I deserve it.

But not this time.

This time, I did fine. I got the victim's wife, a onetime student who took one of my classes at Rainier and audited another one, into the interrogation room -- with her two highly paid attorneys present -- and got an airtight confession on tape, an admission of guilt tied up with a ribbon for the district attorney. The fact that it was a case we all were working on and couldn't crack as a group made it all the sweeter.

But when I got out in the hallway, there he was, looking down at me over his gold-rimmed glasses with those deep brown eyes, and the weirdest expression on his face. First he complimented me, told me I did a good job, which I did, but it always helps when the boss tells you he notices. I felt pretty good, and I cracked a joke at him about this movie we went to see a few days earlier, 'Dogma.' Simon had said he liked the angels in it, so I asked him if he still wanted to get a pair of renegade angels for Major Crime.

We'd made jokes about that after the movie; I'd thought it wasn't that big a deal, making a joke now. I mean, I just cracked the case, found out that a mobster died more or less accidentally instead of as part of some orchestrated gangland maneuver. When the truth got out, as it would soon enough, there'd probably be some seismic upsets in the local mob hierarchy, but we wouldn't have the full-scale gang warfare we'd all been dreading ever since we found the body.

Normally, if there is such a thing, Simon would toss back another wisecrack and maybe follow it with one of his cigars if he were especially pleased. This time, though, the glasses slid down farther on his nose, and he observed me over them for what felt like a long, long time.

It took at least half that time for me to decode his expression.

Not anger, or frustration, or confusion. I'm familiar with those Simon faces. This time, his eyes harbored a swirling mixture of calculation, understanding and pity, and the slightest trace, under it all, of fear.

Before it registered completely with the back of my brain, he replied, "Already have 'em."

Oh. Right. Renegade angels in the P.D.

That's probably a compliment, considering the source.

But why did he look at me as if I'd grown a third eye with glittery green shadow and three-inch false eyelashes in the middle of my forehead?

The hallway outside Major Crime felt too empty, all of a sudden, even for the end of the day, and the one person I expected to see was missing. "Where's Jim?"

"I sent him over to pick up the rest of the forensics reports. Serena called to say the last of the tissue sample and toxicology screens are in."

This wasn't unusual. Major Crime might be a high-status department within Cascade P.D., but we all took on the scut work when needed. Rhonda didn't make all the coffee, or sort and deliver all the interdepartmental mail. If a call came up from Forensics or Records or any other department that something we needed was ready, whoever was available would go over and pick it up.

No big deal.

Except after 4 p.m., when we'd just cracked the case and put it to bed, and the rest of the paperwork would have had to wait until tomorrow anyway.

That meant that Jim had probably asked Simon to give him something to do, to give him a break.

Not unusual again, except Jim generally wanted me with him on breaks, if only for the comfort of having the only person around who usually didn't need explanations. In the Myers-Briggs personality analysis, he's on the line between being an extrovert and an introvert -- sometimes he gets his energy by being with others, sometimes by being alone -- but his private space has room for two most of the time.

Oh.

No.

My stomach balled up like a wadded-up, rained-on term paper and slid as far down in my body as it could go, lumpily.

Now I could read the situation in Simon's expression. Jim must have asked Simon to give him a reason to leave, so he wouldn't have to see or hear me. He could have stayed within the building anywhere and been out of my sight as long as he wanted, but he wouldn't have been able to stop listening to me. He never does. The ears are always on. I've gotten used to it.

He only wants to get that far away when he's had to listen to more than he can bear.

I knew he couldn't hear me from City Hall if he wanted to avoid me; it's far enough away that he'd have to consciously try to do it. It wouldn't be automatic. And it was reasonable for Simon to send him to City Hall, where the Medical Examiner's office was located, next to the hospital with its pathology labs.

But --

What could have put Jim that close to the edge?

We hadn't been doing anything unusual -- or unusual in terms of Sentinel work. Jim had been just fine the past few days as we wore ourselves out to solve it and prevent the local mobsters from deciding to take pot shots at each other in public.

He wasn't always in the room with me on interrogations, now, though this was the first one I'd handled completely solo. Other times, as I asked the questions, he'd lean against the wall in the room somewhere, lending weight and emphasis to my words by the way he stood and the attention he gave to what was happening. Sometimes he'd pace, tossing a question in between two of mine to crank up the tension, slipping out the door and around the corner to the adjacent observation room to watch the result, and coming back in again as if he'd just gotten the word from some official source of a detail that would bring the suspect to his knees.

Observation room.

Oh shit.

Shit, shit, shit.

I'd used the tones of my voice to get Eleanor Ashford's confession, in front of her two attorneys. I'd used guide voice, and added just a little of the kind of command tone I'd learned in the Academy, and done it so casually she hadn't noticed, and she'd given me every answer I wanted.

It had worked perfectly, just as it had every other time I'd used it -- but I'd taken care not to use it around Jim if I could help it, because I didn't know what the result would be.

It couldn't have been good.

And when I looked up, and saw Simon's face again, I knew Simon must have been there with Jim and seen it all.

Double shit again.

"I'd like to see you in my office, Sandburg," said Simon, hitting me full force with the Captain Banks stare, the one that says that you'd better have a very good reason for screwing his life up so badly.

***

At least he shut the door first.

I've got to say, I've always admired that about Simon. He has the presence of mind, and the basic decency, not to cuss us out in front of anyone else, and not to let anyone else take us apart in his presence. It's not that the door is a good insulator, or that the glass windows stop the sound from penetrating every corner of the bullpen. Everyone in Major Crime realizes that there's precious little privacy as it is, and that the Captain is doing his best to give us whatever he can when he's saying something nobody else is supposed to hear -- even at the top of his lungs, which isn't unusual. And it's a good group, there; they all do their best to ignore what they hear and cut whoever was on the hot seat some much-appreciated slack.

He didn't raise his voice this time. He didn't have to. All he had to do was to gaze over those gold-rimmed glasses at me. "Tell me, Blair. How long have you been doing this bit of vocal voodoo?"

If he called me Blair, the lemmings had just cleared the cliffs on their way for a swim. I felt the muscles in the back of my neck tighten, and knew it hadn't escaped him.

Sometimes it felt as if I had two Sentinels to deal with.

"Vocal voodoo, Captain?"

He shrugged one well-tailored shoulder. "Was it something you picked up in the Academy? Because if it was, I'm going to have to recommend your trainer for a commendation. That was an impressive bit of finagling you pulled in there, detective."

"Thank you, sir."

"It's not a compliment, detective."

I could feel the ground shifting under my feet, as if the tile floor under the industrial carpeting had hit a fault line.

He'd already indicated that he approved of how I got the confession. He knew, from hearing it, that when the tape was transcribed nothing in my words would indicate any kind of unreasonable coercion of the suspect. In fact, the tape would show that I'd been polite and civil in my questioning, following up the woman's own words and using them against her, just as I'd learned to do from watching him, and Jim, and the rest of the detectives for the past five years.

But he knew, from watching Jim, that more had happened than what was on that tape.

"It's something I figured out after the academy," I said.

This was no more than the truth. I hadn't put all the pieces together until I'd talked with Naomi shortly before the diss defense about a class she'd taken years earlier. Then I'd used it when I'd faced that panel of skeptical, dubious professors; I'd watched their faces change as they'd accepted everything I'd said. That had felt so good, after all the trouble I'd had. They'd given me everything I wanted and deserved, the doctorate and an appointment to a part-time teaching position as an assistant professor. Since then I'd used it with suspects when it would help, but not often.

"Did you also figure out, while you were at it, the effect it would have on your partner?"

"Not entirely, sir."

The only time I could remember that I'd used this vocal technique around Jim was when I ordered him to get a child out of the way of a mad dog in the park -- no time for thinking, then, only moving to throw a fast, hard kick into the side of that dog as it rushed at Jim and little 'Ceska, and to shoot it when it rushed at them again. He'd taken her to the merry-go-round, and when I caught up with them half an hour later he'd shown no ill effects.

I closed my eyes, hoping I wouldn't have to acknowledge what I guessed was happening. Or had happened, since Jim wasn't in the building any more.

Oh, man. Oh, shit.

The least I could do was to take responsibility for my actions. "Would it help at all if I said I figured you'd be observing but I didn't expect Jim to stay through the whole thing?"

"Why? Because you were doing this -- this -- whatever it was? You should know him better than that. He stayed for it all, and he looked like he was going to lose his last three meals by the end of it." Simon moved closer, looming over me and not in a friendly or sheltering way. His voice dropped lower, and quieter. "Do you realize just how scared he is of you?"

"What?" My jaw dropped. "Scared of me?"

"You'd better believe it. And afraid for you. He said you got sick when you did it before."

I'd asked him to get me drunk after the diss defense. That had to be it. "That's why he didn't leave?"

Simon nodded. "That's my guess. He'd go through hell for you, Blair. In fact, that's what he looked like he was doing in there."

"Why -- how -- "

"I don't pretend to understand how you and Jim run your lives." Simon stepped back from me, shaking his head. He paced to the window and back, which wasn't a long way for someone with legs as long as his. "In fact, I'd almost pay not to know more than I have to about the Sentinel thing. You two have given me more gray hair than Darryl has, and in a lot less time. But I would appreciate it greatly if you would find some way to control this thing, this vocal power. This voodoo." He came back to standing in front of me, and put one heavy hand down on my shoulder as if he expected me to try to escape. "I don't want to see Jim put into that kind of state again."

"How did he look?" I dreaded the answer.

"Like a first-class candidate for a nervous breakdown. He peeled out of here faster than I've seen him move since he left Vice, and he looked worse than he did then." Simon's eyes weren't seeing me, then, I could tell. "He was physically ill, and he was terrified. I don't care what you have to do, with yourself or him. I want you to fix whatever you did, and make sure it stays fixed, or I'll keep you riding a desk until you do."

"And Jim?" I whispered.

"I'll partner him with Connor, or Taggert. Connor knows about the Sentinel thing, and Taggert can be trusted to keep it confidential. But I won't send him out again with you, or even have him work near you unless I have your word that you will get this sorted out ... immediately."

My voice, when it came this time, felt scratchy.

"You have my word on it, Captain."

"Good." His hand dropped off my shoulder. "Get out of here. Go home. I'll send him home when he gets back here. Take a couple of days."

I moved blindly toward the door. "Thanks for telling me."

"I had to, Blair. It hurt too much to see him like that." Simon sounded as bad as I felt. "I'm not just your boss, you know."

"I know."

"Blair?"

"What?"

"How much of that -- influence -- were you putting into your voice in there today?"

"Not much. Maybe twenty-five percent, or so." I thought back. "I've done it more, other times, when I knew Jim wasn't around. The only time I did it all out was when I defended the dissertation." I shrugged. "I wasn't very good at it, then. I've gotten better."

"So you have some level of real control over it already?"

"Yeah. I can turn it on and off, more or less. I just can't control Jim's reaction to it."

"Work on that. Please." Simon swallowed hard. He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers, sighed and looked across at me. "Do you have any idea how tempting it is to have someone with that kind of ability working for me? To know that I can put you in the interview room and almost guarantee that we get what we want? I've only had one other person who could do that and he burned out so badly that I had to stop using him that way, for his sake."

I could guess who he meant. I'd heard the stories of the ex-Ranger who moved up from Vice into Major Crime, whose mere attitude in a room could make a suspect soften unexpectedly into confession.

Jim hadn't kicked that attitude into gear for a long time, not since he became a Sentinel.

Simon stared out the window and rubbed his face with his hands. Something like a shudder ran through him.

"Get out of here."

***

The loft was empty when I arrived home, and every sound echoed. The water pouring from the tap into the teakettle sounded like Niagara Falls. It made me jumpy. When I reached into the cabinet for a box of tea bags, the clock in my old room struck the hour and I jumped, banging into the counter on the way back down. Fortunately, the box of tea didn't fall into the sink. It was one of Naomi's favorite blends, with chamomile to calm and ginseng to balance and hibiscus flowers for vitamin C.

For once, I wished that Naomi was the kind of mother who would be sure to be home at some other phone number. I could always call her, for no reason, to talk and get advice; we'd always done that when we were separated for long, just to keep in touch. However, she'd acquired a sense of emergency from phone calls in the past few years; an unexpected call would have her on the next plane toward me, and the last thing I needed right now would be my mother in the way.

I went into my old room and stared at the desk where I'd spent so many hours writing down the details of Jim Ellison's particular nightmare-turned-gift. But the dissertation was long done. Now, instead of anthropological texts, the desk was stacked with textbooks from the Police Academy.

This room had seen a lot in the past few years. It had been my sanctuary, my work room, my reference library. It had been the place where I worked and studied and dreamed, where I'd cried over Maia and cussed a blue streak as I tried to walk with a gunshot wound healing in my leg. It had been the place where I'd written the Sentinel dissertation of my dreams, and where I'd written the 'official' one on closed police societies and social organization. Now it was just an office, with the futon folded into a daybed against the wall. Now I slept upstairs with Jim, never further away than the touch of a hand.

If he were as scared of me as Simon said he was, would he still want me up there?

Would he still want me at all?

I slammed a hand down on the desk in frustration, and the stack of Academy books tipped and fell on my feet. Fortunately, the mug of tea was nowhere near them; it only sloshed over my other hand and onto the floor a little instead of splashing toward the open bookcase with its treasure of Sentinel lore.

The Academy didn't require a lot of books, compared to Rainier, but most of them were solid, library-quality hardcovers. Since I read quickly, I'd also spent the money on a few extra titles, the ones that went beyond the required reading (much of which I'd already read). As an academic, I knew there was no such thing as too many reference sources. Even so, they were heavy as hell on my feet.

I gulped the rest of the tea and put the mug aside on a shelf as I got down on the floor to pick up the books. They stacked like building blocks in my hands, the bricks and mortar of my second life. I couldn't resist a sigh; police work wasn't likely to help me figure out how to deal with this latest crimp in our lives.

The basic text on police organization, command structures and deployment had a slippery dust cover; it had been a pain at the Academy, as it constantly slid out from between other books as I carried them. I shoved the rest of the books up onto the desk and got down on hands and knees to reach where it had slid, fallen open, under my desk.

And blinked.

The book had fallen open at the page that outlined the responsibilities of command. I'd scribbled into the margin, during the lecture, "Officer in charge (primary?) of crime scene, must deploy people to keep scene undisturbed, make it possible for techs to do job. Officers must be able to trust that higher-ups will back them up, look out for them -- reason for routine procedures."

Sometimes I'm wrong. This time it was about the relevance of police work.

I'd known for a long time that Jim might have marvelous abilities but I was the one in charge of how they worked, no matter how well he fine-tuned them. Part of this was reflex on his part; he'd been a soldier for so long that listening to and obeying a voice of authority was second nature to him. And I'd exercised that authority -- when Incacha died, and Jim was hysterical with grief, I'd pushed him out to the roof and ordered him to call back his senses, and he'd done it. I'd given him no other choice.

I still had that authority, without using voice. I had to find a way to use it.

I closed the book and took the mug back to the kitchen, my mind a collage of images and voices:

The look of wonder on Jim's face when he realized for the first time that he could piggyback sound on sight and hear at a distance. Simon's low voice, and his expression, hovering between faith in me and fear for Jim. Naomi's voice, talking to me after we'd visited her parents for a few days --

Naomi.

Naomi had been sitting under a tree, leaning against her backpack as we waited for a ride out of town. I'd been about twelve then, flopped out on the grass next to her, listening to her talk about her childhood, and I'd felt awful. I didn't know what I'd done, exactly, but her father had blown his stack at her about it and I'd gotten caught in the middle and now we were leaving.

"I'm sorry. I screwed it up, Naomi."

"No, you didn't." She reached over to hug me. "You were polite and well-informed, and you defended your opinion without using personal attacks. I'm very proud of you."

"But Grandpa wasn't, and I don't think Grandma was, either."

"It's all right, Blair. Really." She put her hand under my chin and tipped it up until I looked into her eyes. "Besides, we were going to leave tomorrow, anyway, to go to Charissa's."

"Okay." I tried to smile for her. "He's not used to being wrong, is he?"

Naomi shook her head, her expression somewhere between laughter and tears. "No, sweetie, he's not." She drew a breath. "Did you know that he was career Army when I was a child? He was a sergeant in the tank corps in Korea."

"Grandpa?" I'd rolled over and sat up straighter. "I thought he worked at the auto factory."

"That's since he retired. He left the Army after twenty years, but he's never let the Army leave him."

"Yeah. I noticed. That whole lecture yesterday about responsibility."

"Oh, Blair. He wasn't aiming that at you. That was for me."

"You? You're the most responsible person I know!"

She'd shaken her head. "He doesn't see it that way, of course. He thinks I should have gotten married."

"But you had good reasons not to."

"I had good reasons. Getting married would have been irresponsible when I could take care of you myself. And we do all right, don't we?" She'd looked anxious, so I'd smiled at her and tossed a twisted strand of grass at her. It had hit her long braid of hair and fallen apart, and she'd flicked the braid back over her shoulder with her bright smile that showered me with love.

"We do just fine, Ma."

"Yes, we do. Absolutely." She had plucked the rest of the grass off her shirt and threw it back at me, giggling.

And then the old VW bus had pulled up, and we'd gone off to visit Charissa and her dogs and cats and her enormous vegetable garden for a month, and I'd never thought again about Sgt. Jacob Sandburg of the U.S. Army Tank Corps.

I smiled at that memory, but other, more recent memories slid into my mind, tumbling like a falling house of cards. Defending the dissertation, where I stood in front of six seated professors, taking every question they could ask me with confidence, knowing they could not refute my words or refuse me what I'd earned. Jim refilling my glass with straight shots afterward, watching me get stone drunk, then putting me gently to bed and watching over me in case I got sick. The incredible rush of using voice on a suspect, knowing I could get the answers without failure because the suspects would feel they had to tell me what I asked. The empty industrial beige hallway outside the interview room, with Simon standing in it like a dark mountain, and later, in his office, his dark eyes brimming with compassion and fear.

It all came back to the same place: power, and its use, and misuse.

***

Jim came through the door eighteen minutes after I went back downstairs, tossing his jacket onto its hook and taking off his holster and weapon as if it were any other day. I handed him a beer as he slid shut the drawer he'd stowed the gun in, and he nodded to me and clinked it against my own bottle.

"Good job on the interview today, Chief." Oh, he wasn't one hundred percent well, but he was acting up a typhoon. "How do you feel about it?" He leaned a hip against the counter and turned to look at me.

"What, you're asking me about my feelings?"

"You flew solo." He took a deep swig of beer, and I watched his throat move as he swallowed. "How was it?"

Flying solo. I felt as if I'd jumped out over Peru again, without the parachute. But lemmings didn't get parachutes, did they?

"I'm fine." It was true physically, at least. "The D.A. should have no trouble getting a conviction."

"I'm proud of you," he said, all congratulation, but the smile didn't reach his eyes.

Did he think I couldn't see the fear moving inside him, after all these years?

"How are you feeling, Jim?"

"Me?" Another long gulp of beer went down his muscular throat.

"Simon said you didn't look well, and he sent you out for a break. What happened?"

He finished the bottle in the third gulp and brought the empty down to the counter with a brief clatter, off balance. "Nothing. Bad air in the observers' room, or something. I'll ask maintenance to check the filter there; it's probably more of that mildew problem from last year."

Was that the way it was going to be?

In every relationship, someone's got to be in charge.

"I don't think that was the problem."

"No? Then what was it?"

"Don't lie to me, Jim. Please."

"Lie? Me lie to you?" His voice sounded lighter, almost impersonal. "Haven't we already established that that's impossible? That you can read me like one of your textbooks?"

Shit. He really is afraid of me.

I put my half-finished beer down on the counter.

"Jim. Please. Just talk to me."

He turned his back to me and leaned on the edge of the counter hard, as if he needed to hold it to stand up. "Blair -- "

"I'm sorry. I am so, so sorry, Jim."

"For what?" His head came up and he turned half -way around, his eyes burning bright. "What have you got to be sorry about?"

"I should have leveled with you about the diss defense."

"What?" Honest confusion, now, with forehead wrinkles.

"Let's sit down, okay? This is hard enough to do without having to stand for it."

He nodded once. Instead of sitting on the couch, in his usual place, he opted for the big yellow chair. It wasn't big enough for both of us, and he knew it. He wasn't taking any chances this time, I could tell. From that chair, he could see both the front door and my old room, which led to the back door, while leaving himself an emergency exit by way of the balcony.

God. How had he gone to feeling so threatened without my seeing it?

I sat on the couch, close enough that he could reach me if he wanted to, but far enough away to give him some room. I didn't want him to feel cornered. He was defensive enough already.

"At the party, when I asked you to take me home and get me drunk. Why do you think I wanted that, Jim?"

He shrugged, as if the answer were obvious. "Aftereffects of too much self-control. You needed to cut loose. Rites of passage, all that stuff."

"I could've cut loose at the party, and nobody would've said a thing. It was my party, Jim, celebrating an academic rite of passage. If I'd torn off my clothes and danced naked on the bar, nobody would've said a word." I let myself smile a little, imagining how that would've livened up the party. Academic parties tend to be such sedate affairs. "So, since it wasn't just for release, why?"

I was pushing him, and he knew it. His eyes flashed, sliding from one door to the other, and back to me.

"I thought," he said slowly, "you were overdoing it with the voice-control stuff. I could tell you were doing it; I could feel it through the door, don't ask me how. Your heart rate was up, your blood pressure was up, and then both of them dropped back to normal or a little below that, and you did something with your voice and -- and -- I couldn't listen any more."

"Why couldn't you listen?"

He squeezed his eyes shut, as if the room's dim light was too intense. "It hurt, Chief. Listening to that sound in your voice hurt so much. You sounded calm, your words sounded reasonable, I guess, but I wasn't listening to the words. I -- I can't describe what it felt like under the words. All I knew was that you were hurting, badly, and I wanted to make it better. I felt so fucking helpless."

Okay. It's a start. He's going in the wrong direction, but at least he's on the right road. "You were right about overdoing it. I wasn't doing it right, not at all." How to explain it to him, though? "Naomi took a class on 'power speaking' years ago, and this is something like that. You gather in energy from the cosmos and channel it through your body, and use it to make people want to listen to you."

"Channel energy through your body? Did I just hit the Sci-Fi Channel?"

"It's a metaphor, Jim. I can't explain it in words any better than you can explain how your senses work."

He seemed to accept that with a grunt. "So what went wrong?"

"Think of it in terms of electricity; you ground it so you don't get a shock. But it's all a metaphor." I switched into teaching mode, hoping it would calm both of us. "When you start to, well, use energy like that, you're supposed to ground yourself, plug into nature and draw up energy from outside yourself so it will circulate through the system and then go back to earth again. It's a cycle; you borrow it and you use it and you send it back, like a river running through a hydroelectric plant."

"You're mixing metaphors, Chief."

He's loosening up enough to criticize my methodology. This is a Good Thing, as Martha Stewart might say. I dared to crack a small smile and kept going.

"So sue me. Anyway, the big thing to remember is that you're not supposed to use your own energy except to control the energy you're borrowing, the way a pipe holds water. I forgot about that, and I used my own energy. I used too much of it at once, and wore myself out."

He nodded. "You're pushy, Blair, but you're not good at pushing yourself like that."

"Yeah. I've learned to do it better, since then. But let's get back to then. How much of what I was doing did you pick up, that day, from the lounge down the hall?"

I could see him flipping through the mental pages, shifting into detective mind, calmer. He could do this. "It wasn't like that. You went into a different -- " he frowned, seeking a word, "mode than usual. You weren't yourself."

"I wasn't myself." I repeated.

"It wasn't a better Blair Sandburg, or a worse one. It was just a different one." He raised his eyes to mine, and finally I could see past his defenses. "You've been that way at times, since -- since the fountain. When you came back here, that first night." He shut his eyes, briefly, as if holding back something overwhelming. "When you got back from the hospital, after your first case. When we took 'Ceska to the park and the dog rushed her."

"How am I different?" I felt honestly curious. I knew what it felt like on the inside, but from the outside? No clue.

"You have no fear." He moved his hands as if trying to grasp something too large to hold, realized he was doing it and stared at his hands for a moment as if they belonged to someone else. When he gazed up at me again his voice sounded solemn. "It feels too much like I'm watching myself, in Peru. It's a bit scary."

Whew. That, I didn't expect.

"Because you'd lost everything?"

Jim shook his head. "Not that. I wasn't afraid, because I didn't think I had anything left to be afraid of. The worst thing I could think of at that time had already happened; I'd lost my men. I wasn't that afraid of dying, or of pain." His mouth went to a straight, white line, as it always did when he thought of his lost men. "But you ... you went past that and came back. You don't have anything to be scared of any more. That's ... unnerving."

Okay. We're getting somewhere here. It's not just the voice, it's the attitude.

Unfortunately, the attitude is part of who I am now. I don't think that's about to leave.

My expression must have changed. He hurried on. "It's also part of what makes you a good cop, Chief. You don't take unnecessary risks, but you don't hesitate, either." He gave me an earnest smile on that. "I feel really secure with you backing me up, and I don't want you to think otherwise."

"Ditto, man." Whoa. Let's get back on target here. "So I was a different person the day I got back from the hospital, but you didn't pick up any weirdness from it."

"No weirder than usual, Einstein." He crooked a grin at me. "You kept going like a Sherman tank, and then you folded and didn't have anything left, which is more or less your usual M.O., but you went from charge to fold way too fast at Rainier."

"Yeah. I didn't do it right. Don't know, though; if I'd been jacked into the available energy, I'd probably be president of Rainier University by now, which wouldn't help us much either." I grinned back at him. "It's one of those rock rules."

"Rock rules?"

"Yeah. Jagger's Law: you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you just might find -- "

"-- you get what you need," he finished for me.

He'd relaxed a lot in the past few minutes. I figured I could chance coming back to the actual subject under discussion. "So, that day, it didn't make you feel ill?"

The tension flashed back. He snapped a stare at me, and cut it off almost immediately. "Simon."

"Jim --"

His mouth clamped shut tight, though I could hear the words continuing unspoken. Simon wouldn't have been flattered. After a tense moment he ran a hand over his face and leaned back into the chair's cushions, stretching his legs.

Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, but, I hoped, no need to hide.

"I was worried about you. I didn't want you tearing yourself apart in there the way you did at Rainier." He looked away, then back at me, the way a cat looks aside and back when it's interested but doesn't want to appear threatening or too forward. In humans, it means the mind is processing information, pulling it out of the storage room instead of working from immediately available knowledge. "And your voice, it did something to me. It pulled at me, twisted at me. If I'd been in the room I would've confessed before she did, and I knew I couldn't do that. Hence the stomach problem."

We were getting a lot further in less time now than a few years ago. He'd never have admitted in words that he was afraid, back then. Trust still wasn't easy for him, with all the betrayals he'd survived; I felt grateful for every small word he offered me, every glimpse behind the walls.

The only time I could be sure the walls were all the way down to dust was in bed, when both of us had our senses open and our attention on each other.

I had to ask. "Why did you keep listening today, when it was making you sick?"

This time his words made the merest whisper. "I thought you might need me, Chief. I thought you'd needed me to put you together before, and you'd need me again." I could have wept at the sound of his voice. "I guess I was wrong."

I had to catch him before he closed himself off again.

"No, you weren't." I leaned toward him, and put my hand on the arm of his chair, invading his space for the first time. "I did need you, and I do need you. All the time, Jim. But the problem we've got is that I screwed up in how I used my voice back then, and it hurt me, but I did it right today and it hurt you."

His eyebrows knitted over confused eyes. "I don't understand."

"Think about it."

"I don't want to."

"I don't either, but this isn't something we can shove into a closet."

He let this sink in for a while.

"So, I screwed it up. Is that what you're saying?"

"No, I did, and now we have a problem that I don't know how we're going to fix."

I'd spent five years training Jim Ellison to respond to my voice, to come out of zones, to track me in crime-infested streets by the sound of my heartbeat and breathing. If I had to untrain him, now, would that write his death warrant?

Jim, I'm scared.

I didn't think I'd even subvocalized the words, but I knew he'd heard them somehow. He moved over, onto the couch next to me, and pulled me into his arms. "Me too," he admitted in a whisper.

We sat like that until the light through the long windows faded into darkness, my head against his shoulder, my forehead against his cheekbone, his arms around me rocking me slowly, slowly.

"I have an idea, maybe, a way we could work on it." The words came slowly, tentatively. "A sort of reverse testing." Jim's voice sounded soft in the darkness, unexpectedly deep, probably because I was hearing it with my head so close to his chest. "I think we shouldn't try it here, though, in case it doesn't work right. We need some place that doesn't matter emotionally."

"Neutral turf." He was right, emotionally and psychologically. "Where?"

"We can figure that out in the morning." He hesitated. "You're not planning to do any more of that tonight, are you?"

"God, no. No, Jim."

"That's good. I don't think I could take it." Honesty, devastating and final, in a whisper. "I know you're the one running things around here, a lot of the time, but -- but I hate it when I can't say no."

His arms tightened around me. I shifted so that I was holding him as much as he was holding me. He looked as if half of him was a frightened child, and the other half was the sentinel trying to stand guard, but unable to comfort the child while he guarded him.

I felt something rip inside me and tear open. Crying might have eased the pain, but it hurt too much to cry, and it would have distressed him even more. I didn't want to add to the desolation he felt. He wasn't blaming me, though it was my fault; he was blaming himself again.

I couldn't stand that.

I took his face in my hands and kissed him, as gently as I could. His response was anything but gentle. One hand came up my back, holding me close; the other slid buttons out of buttonholes and pushed the shirt open, and his mouth slid down my throat, nibbling and caressing.

When all other forms of comfort fail, fire warms.

His hair brushed like silk under my hand, but the muscles in his shoulders moved like steel coils under warm satin skin. I traced the patterns outlining them, and slid my thumbs to the back of his neck, to the place I'd found that always, always lit his torch.

Jim's head reared back, and he stared at me with eyes gone love-blind. "Upstairs."

"Yes."

He got up so fast that he was half carrying me most of the way to the stairs. I didn't complain. By the time I hit the bed I might have had one sock on, but nothing else; when he landed on the mattress next to me and reached for me, he wore only skin, all of which had to be in contact with me immediately.

Jim has always tried to blame himself for things that weren't his fault; I blame that on his father's perfectionism, drilled into him too much and too often. Whenever I've been injured on a case, Jim has checked me out more thoroughly than any physician I've ever met. This was no different, only more intense. His hands moved over my skin, touching, feeling, sensing differences in temperature for all I knew. His lips followed, kissing every inch of me, licking and nibbling at the lines of old childhood scars and teasing a little at the newer ones, where the nerves under the skin had grown back in different patterns than in the untouched skin nearby.

Gentle kisses along my neck, across the narrow scar where I'd felt a bullet crease my shoulder, the touch of his warm, inquiring tongue on the indented scar from another bullet that had gone straight through, a kiss moving lower along the twisted scar in my leg from the bullet at the mine ... he was driving me out of my mind with pleasure, loving me everywhere except on the red flag that bobbed between us, leaking traces on my belly, on his thighs and legs and chest -- and then he stopped, and slid back up to lie beside me, holding me tight, his own cock as ready as mine.

"Inside me, please? I need -- need to know you're -- still -- "

Yes. Anything. Anything to keep that pleading note out of his voice.

I rolled onto my back and he straddled me, already prepared though I couldn't even imagine how he'd found time with what he'd been doing. I know I was slick and dripping, waiting for him, watching him. As he slid down slowly onto me, I watched his face, and saw his face relax, at peace for the first time that night. My hands caught his, fingers interlaced, and for a moment we were still, watching each other, linked, feeling the fire flare through us both and blaze as high as any ancient bonfire built of old oak and memories.

Bonfires started as bonefires, burning the bones of the dead, reducing the past to something usable, something helpful to the earth. Bonefires, calling the spirits of the dead to bear witness and aid the living.

Our bones were burning, hot, hot for each other --

I brought my hands down to his cock and stroked it, running my thumbs around the flaring crown. He sighed and took a breath, braced his hands on my shoulders, and started to move, centimeter by centimeter. I could have sworn that he was using his senses to measure how far and fast he moved.

I didn't care. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered except the warmth of the fire within us, hotter, faster, dancing higher with each movement until he came, panting my name, and I followed within a heartbeat.

When my heart slowed so that I could breathe again, without feeling dizzy, he was lying beside me, one arm and leg thrown over me, holding me close, chuckling quietly to himself.

"What?"

"And you were worried last week that we were getting too used to each other."

"So I was wrong. Sue me."

"I'd rather do this." He nuzzled my ear. "Lawyers turn me off."

"I've never wanted to be a lawyer."

"Knew there was a reason why I love you."

***

In the morning, he called Simon to verify that we'd be away for a few days. We stopped by the P.D. long enough to sign the reports that needed attention, and long enough for Jim to get the key to Simon's cabin, and we hit the road again.

It took an hour to get into the hills where the cabin stood, by the side of a trout stream feeding a small lake, and before we got there we stopped off for groceries and supplies at a shopping plaza, so we reached the place just before lunch time. I'd been there once before, but it had been more than a year so nothing looked that familiar.

Jim tossed me the key as he put on the brakes, and I hopped out to unlock the gate by the road. I held it open as he drove through and locked it again. "I don't remember the gate from before," I told Jim.

"He said he'd had some trouble with people breaking into the place last year, and the gate tends to dissuade them," he said, steering with ease along the rutted dirt path.

"Makes sense -- whoa!"

The truck jammed to a stop, Jim's arm out to hold me in place as if Detroit had never heard of seat belts.

An eight-point buck stared back at us from the path, as if inquiring about our intentions. He lifted a front hoof and pawed the ground, then turned to watch as two does wandered past him from the brush on one side of the path into the woods on the other. Losing interest in us, he followed them with an almost visible shrug in our direction.

I started to breathe again. The truck came out of park and continued down the track.

"How much farther is it?"

Jim frowned. "We should be almost there now. Should be able to see the chimney -- oh, fuck."

I didn't have to ask what he was upset about; as soon as we cleared the last stand of trees it was painfully obvious.

Where Simon's comfortable, rustic cabin had stood was a charred ruin, punctuated by a chimney jutting out of the remaining section of roof.

***

"Must have happened during the winter," Jim said thoughtfully. "I couldn't smell much of anything until we hit the clearing. He poked at the scorched wall by the fireplace and stepped down hard on the remaining floor boards, which held up under his weight.

I leaned down to get a view of the fireplace. "We could still cook in this, as long as the chimney's clear."

Duh. As if the chimney would matter, any more, when the room was missing.

"Uh-huh. Fire didn't start at this end; someone got careless on the other side, where the electric box was." He shook his head. "Shame. It was a pretty place. Chief, you're the closest thing to a psychologist handy; why aren't there ever tidy vagrants, just messy ones?"

"The tragedy of the commons, probably. If it's not theirs, it doesn't matter. Where do you want to set up the tent? This is a little too open-air for me, I think." I waved a hand at the ruined walls. "I mean, I love camping with you, don't get me wrong, but sleeping under the stars in late April is no way the same as in July."

Jim straightened and glanced around for a moment. "Wind's from over there, other side of this wall. We can set up the pop-up tent in here, next to the fireplace; the floor's sturdy enough and the fire can keep us warm. Floor's amazingly sturdy, actually, considering the heat this fire must have put out." He bounced up and down on a cross-timber that supported the plank floor. "Figures. It's just above the ground, and the footing is poured concrete. We'd've been out of luck if it'd been concrete block; one sneeze and the whole thing would kaboom."

"Great." I didn't want to think about kaboom, not with those scorched timbers still over my head. "I'm going to look for firewood."

"You do that, Chief. Don't forget to wash off in the creek before lunch."

I stopped in my tracks as the fact of no indoor plumbing connected with my reality. Right. No hot showers. No indoor toilet. "Um, for the latrine, be sure to pick a tree the bears aren't using, Jim. I like a little privacy."

"Sure thing." He gave me that smart-ass grin. "And I'll call Simon and let him know about the fire."

Right. I didn't want to be around for that.

***

The pop-up tent, Simon's Christmas gift to Jim, fitted nicely in the corner space Jim cleared by the fireplace. The standing wall blocked the wind, and the newly cleared fireplace had a small fire started by the time I returned with an armload of deadfalls.

"Official latrine is behind that tree over there, Chief." Jim pointed toward a copse of trees a few yards from the tent. "You know the drill -- "

"Yeah, yeah, take the shovel and cover what you leave. It's not like we haven't camped in bear country before."

"But not in the spring." Jim lifted his head and sniffed the air, and I suppressed a snicker. "No bear sign in the area, and I don't smell any upwind of us. Any that are downwind will go the other way, I think." He'd unpacked some of the cooking gear and was setting up a camp kitchen, with a flat stone he'd carried in for a work area. "Our problem is going to be food; we shopped with the idea that we'd have a fridge. I can set up a cooler in the stream, to take care of things that will keep for a day or two, like cheese and eggs, but we're going to have to cook the meat today." He waved a package of ground beef-lamb mix that I'd talked him into as an alternative to pure cow. "How do you want your chili?"

"Better make it only two-alarm, and go easy on the beans. The tent's not that big."

He grinned, dumped the meat into the pot and started adding spices.

I built up the fire and moved the backpacks out of the truck and into the tent. Just as a precaution, I brought the shotgun and the box of shells out of the back of the truck as well.

Most people don't know Jim has a shotgun; they think he's too 'city' or something. It's not like that, though. This isn't one of those $99 specials from the local store; it's an expensive English model that his father gave him for his birthday a year ago. It was a kind of an apology for not having been there when Jim needed him, and a way to ask Jim to take care of himself at the same time. For once, Jim realized what was going on, accepted the gift, and put it and the box of shells in the truck, down behind the seat where it wouldn't be obvious.

Neither of us has had to use it, yet, but as we've both learned over the years, some problems can't be stopped by fast talk or a Sig Sauer, or a hurricane kick to the enemy's ribs. And, when all else fails, a loud shotgun makes a great alarm signal.

"Get the rope, too," Jim called to me. "We're going to have to hoist the food to keep it away from animals."

I threw a coil of rope over my shoulder. "How long were you a Boy Scout, Jim?"

"All the way to First Class, Chief, with a year in the Explorers thrown in. It shows, huh?"

"Majorly. And that chili smells great."

***

"The way I see it, Chief, we've gotten into a rut."

Jim sat on a rock by the creek, next to me. I watched the light play with the ripples on the water, and the occasional back of a fish just skimming the surface. He probably saw the fish, the ripples, the disturbance in the water curling out from the fish's tail, and the pebbles on the bottom.

"Go on."

"I use my senses, you coach me, and you do diagnostics on me when it doesn't work. Am I right?"

I nodded. "So far. I'm not sure I see the rut, though. I mean, this has worked for years now."

"But it hasn't always worked. Remember when we went to Peru to find Simon and Darryl, and my senses turned off and on like a light switch?"

One fish coasted into an eddy in the stream, near an overhanging tree root.

"And?"

"My emotions were getting in the way of using them, just like when Danny got killed. Whenever I started to think about you leaving, it hurt." His hand came down over mine on the sun-warmed rock, anchoring me. "Didn't you write some article a few months ago about mind-body synchronicity?"

"Body-mind synchronicity in modern tribal rituals. It was on piercings and tattoos." Sunlight struck a ripple and flashed into my eye, and I blinked. "You're thinking of getting a tattoo?"

He cuffed the back of my head gently, like a bear playing. "I could turn down the pain receptors so it wouldn't hurt at all."

Zing. That's a scary thought, Jim Ellison as the Tattooed Man in the circus, all those rippling muscles, those slopes and planes decorated in color. I felt my cock start to take notice. Down, boy. We're trying to talk business, here. Don't get uppity. "Your point was?"

"When your emotions were too involved, you used -- energy, whatever -- the wrong way, and wore yourself out. But, when you weren't that invested in the outcome, yesterday, you used less energy and you were more effective." He made one of those smooth, indeterminate gestures with his hands that meant he couldn't quite find the words and hoped I had an unabridged dictionary handy nearby that included Jimerican Sign Language. "You were so effective that I wanted to confess to the murder."

"Because you rely on me for your senses, and you're so used to listening to me tell you what to do." I nodded slowly. Ideas were starting to cluster, like mushrooms after rain. "The problem is that you listen to me uncritically."

"Uncritically." He mulled this one.

"In the scholastic sense, uncritically. You don't analyze what I tell you. You never did. You go with what your body tells you and it works. It's effective; it's kept you alive." I paused to let the mushroom ideas grow a little taller, a little more defined in my swampy mind. I've always thought I had a mind like a wet sponge that picks up everything; well, maybe it needed to be washed more often. No. No brainwashing. Not going there. Mushrooms. Ideas. Criticism. "You don't spend a lot of time analyzing what we do."

"That's always been your area, Darwin."

I persisted, "You don't think afterward, 'If he touches my back instead of my arm, there's a different result.'"

Now I was getting the full skeptical stare, with a cockeyed grin thrown in. "And if he touches me here," he put my hand on his cock, beneath the zipper, "instead, there's definitely a different result."

"Ellison, we're talking about work, not play." I gave him a light squeeze, just to get his reaction, and a gentle tap before pulling my hand away. "You don't do criticism normally, so it's not a reflex. Maybe we need to work on that."

"I think we need to work on it both ways, Darwin. You need to do better at how you use your energy, and I need to work on my reaction to you using it. Good thing we have this feedback loop, isn't it?" Jim took my hand in his. "When you're not doing it right, I can tell."

Another mushroom pushed through the damp inner ground.

"When I used voice on you with 'Ceska, you didn't get sick, did you?"

He shook his head. "It didn't have that feeling to it. That was just following orders; we had to move fast to save her life and ours, like in the Army. Why?"

"I put everything I had into it, that time, and aimed it at you, and you had no bad effects -- and I didn't get sick. I must have done it right that time." I took a breath. "I only used about a quarter of it yesterday with Eleanor Ashford."

"So it makes a difference whether I'm the target or a bystander."

"Guess so."

"And the kind of mood or emotions you're feeling makes a difference."

"And maybe the way you're listening to me. Yesterday, you were worried, right? Checking to see if I was all right?"

He nodded. "I probably had my senses jacked a little too high."

"So you picked up what I was aiming at Eleanor and the senses magnified it."

"Yeah." He tossed a stick into the stream, and the shadowy fish darted away, then back to nose at it as if it might be food. "We've got to work on that."

"You said you had some ideas about how to do it," I said slowly. I was totally without ideas, for once. The thought of having to mess with what we'd spent years building was still bothering me.

"Yeah," he said again. He gave me a sideward, measuring glance. "I'm going to be your guide this time, Darwin, and you're going to take the tests."

"Okay." A beat. "What kind of tests?"

"Give me a minute or two. I'm still working on them," he growled.

"Oookay. No problem."

***

Half an hour later, I was practicing grounding and centering, finding the connection to the power outside myself, and Jim was telling me what I was doing as if it were opening day at the World Series and he were doing the play-by-play.

"Okay, Chief. You're doing all right, pulling it up, and letting go of it. I can see the energy, whatever, like heat ripples on a road in the summer, flowing up into you and down again. Now, turn it off, ground it out. No, you're still rippling. Ground it out. Put your hands on the ground, or on a tree. Yeah, that's it. Start over again, from scratch."

I felt the sweat running down the middle of my back, as if it were summer. "Man, I don't ever remember hearing you talk this much."

"Never had this much reason. C'mon, Chief. Get with the program. We've got a lot to do."

"Right." I focused inward, sensing past the constant movement of heartbeat and blood pumping and digestive churning for the clear flow of that core channel, the chakra energy running up and down my spine. I stretched my attention downward from the channel to the earth, found the pulse of energy there that could grow redwoods and power typhoons and give strength and speed to whales and falcons, and linked myself to it. The earth energy started to move upward, through me as if I were a pipeline, up my spine, pinging on each energy center throughout my body, out the top of my head and into the universe.

"Oh, that's good. That's really good, Chief."

"What does it look like?" I'd done this for years, but had never had anyone around who could see it that well.

"You're glowing around the edges, sort of. It's like watching the Northern Lights without the sound effects."

"Whoa. I didn't even realize they had sound effects." I thought a moment. "Have you ever seen Kirlian photography?"

"Kirlian photography?" He thought a moment. "Wasn't that what your friend in the art school was doing in that exhibit we went to last winter?"

"You've got it. She was taking pictures of the energy fields around plants and animals. Remember the print of the leaf, with the flicker of color all around the edges? And the hands? That's photographing the aura, Jim."

"That's probably pretty close to what I'm seeing, then, except in motion. Your colors change as you talk, Chief, but overall they look pretty bright and clear."

"According to Naomi, that's supposed to be a good sign. If they were muddy, something would be wrong."

"Naomi would know, if anyone would."

"Yes, she would. She said your aura is particularly bright when you've just solved a case, for instance." I decided not to mention that she'd also said his aura was the same color as his eyes. Or I'd save that for another moment, one that didn't include my trying to light myself up like a Roman candle without being able to see the effect. "Okay, fearless leader. What next?"

"You've got some suggestions?"

I shrugged. "Naomi and I used to play energy games." I cupped my hands, drew them a few inches apart, and noticed the springy feeling in the air between them that meant that the energy was moving and flowing properly.

"Like what?" He leaned against a tree, arms crossed, the way he leaned against the Major Crime door when waiting for a punch line to one of Brown's jokes.

"Like this." I patted the energy into a compressed shape -- something like an invisible warm snowball -- and threw it at him. Jim's eyes widened and he shoved himself away from the tree, following something with his eyes.

"You used to do that?"

"What, you could see it?"

"Yeah, Chief. It went through the tree and kept going."

"Hmph. It was supposed to hit the tree and splash a lot, like a water balloon."

"Water balloons don't have comet tails on them," he insisted. "You and Naomi used to do this a lot? I'm going to have to respect that woman a lot more the next time I see her."

I grinned. "Now you're telling me you don't respect my mother?"

He raised a hand. "I never said that. I'm just saying I'm going to respect her more. Nothing wrong with that. You want to try tossing that thing at me again, and I'll see if I can catch it?"

So we did that for a few minutes. I made energy balls and tossed them at him as if I were a Major League pitcher going for the pennant, and he caught them like Cal Ripken making easy outs at third base. He threw them back, and they felt just a little different after leaving his hands. Cooler, maybe the energy equivalent of pine-scented fresh, which seemed strange the first time I thought of it, but accurate. We weren't around that many pine trees.

Jim went all out for a wild throw, dived into a pile of leaves and came up spitting them out. "Enough with playing catch, Chief. Let's work on the side effects thing."

"You sure you're ready?" I checked the sky. It wouldn't be that long until dark. "Maybe we should do that tomorrow. Or after dinner."

"Procrastination won't solve anything. Besides, we're going to have to replicate the tests under various conditions, and I'd like to start with a daytime baseline." He wore a wicked grin. "Isn't that the way you social-scientist types would say it?"

"I am not a type. I'm not even a typeface, although I do have letters after my name." I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and did it again for good measure. "Okay. What do you want me to do?"

"You're pretty cooperative."

"I'm trying to show you a good example. Later on I'll show you a good time, and then you can be cooperative."

"Promises, promises." Jim came around to stand behind me. "See that tree, over there?"

"We're in a forest, Jim. Which tree?"

"The one with the broken limb about ten feet up, and the scratch marks on the bark."

"Okay. You want me to do what with it?"

"Whatever you want. Aim some of that energy at it, the way you were doing with Eleanor Ashford in the interview room. Persuade it a little."

Great. Now that he's the guide he's got delusions of grandeur. What am I supposed to do, tell it to get up and walk? Heal itself?

"Okay." What do you say to a tree, anyway? "And you'll tell me if you get any splashback, right?"

"Right." He paused. "Any time now."

If I was going to have to persuade a tree, I'd have to anthropomorphize it. Right. Shamans have been talking to trees for millennia, and here I was, feeling tongue-tied. But it wasn't just that, I knew. I so didn't want to screw it up again.

"Relax, Chief," came from behind me.

Relax. Real axe. Genuine chopper. Firewood. Probably not what I should be talking about in a forest, especially when addressing a tree.

"You know, you've got really wonderful bark over there. The texture looks so interesting-- "

"Persuade it, don't seduce it." He snickered.

"Shut up, Jim. You're messing with my concentration. Now, where was I?" I could feel his grin behind me without turning around. "All right. I know you've had troubles lately with insects, but that's nothing. Just straighten up a little, shake those branches into order, and tell me all about that bird that's nesting in your trunk."

"That's good, so far. How much are you putting into it?"

"About 25 percent. Any splashback?"

"No. Keep going."

Naomi had taught me to reach for energy signatures, to use the energy of the aura as a kind of sensor net to determine where other living things were. Maybe it was just that I was paying so much attention to that one particular tree, but it felt especially alive, so I aimed the energy at the aliveness. "That's some kind of owl, isn't it, in there? Or maybe something else; it's a pretty big hole. Talk to me, tell me you care." I was starting to feel pretty silly, and I was glad Jim was the only onlooker. "No, wait. I want you to do something different now. I want you to pull up your roots, get up and walk away from me." I poured the energy into my words, and a bit of frustration. "Do it. Get up. Pull up those roots and go for a walk."

A hundred feet further into the brush beyond the tree, a pair of deer turned startled heads toward us and leaped away, out of sight in a moment.

"Chief --"

I swerved around. Jim clutched his stomach as if he were about to fall over.

"I was fine, up until that last couple of sentences." He sat down hard on a fallen tree trunk. "What did you do?"

"I got a little frustrated, I guess." I grounded myself and went to stand behind him. When I put my hands on his shoulders, I visualized the energy coming up through me like water in a spring, going down through my hands and into him and gently flowing over whatever hurt, washing it away and back into the ground.

Jim stared up at me, astonished. "What did you do? The pain is gone."

"More energy stuff. It's a kind of healing. I'm not that good at it, though; what I can do is the equivalent of two aspirin most of the time." I rubbed his shoulders reassuringly. "We should take a break. This kind of thing can wear you out, especially if you haven't done it much."

"Guess so." He ran a hand over his face. "I have to keep telling myself to take this seriously. It's real, I know it. But I can't touch it or sense it, and it bothers me."

"C'mon. Let's get some food. We can do more later."

***

Dinner was a plowman's lunch, modern style: bread, cheese, fruit and coffee instead of ale. Jim slung the sack with the rest of the food over a tree branch to dangle well off the ground at the end of its long rope, and went to the woods edge to gather more firewood for the night.

I had only half my attention on the leaping fire in the fireplace. The rest of it was replaying the tests we'd done, trying to figure out what had made the difference, what had caused the change from ease to pain for Jim.

It couldn't just be my attitude toward whoever I was talking with. Some of it had to be Jim's attitude.

But which attitude?

I felt so tired of having to deal with fear-based reactions, both his and mine. He was right. I had lost most of my fears with death and recovery, and with the growing of the shamanic world in my life in recent months fear of physical trouble and pain grew more and more remote. I wasn't afraid to face people and situations that would have terrified me a few years ago.

The only thing I had left to fear was losing Jim.

And Jim was afraid of being so far under my control that he couldn't escape.

It sounded too easy, looked at that way. Such nice interpersonal terrors, so neatly co-dependent.

Wasn't there someone in Greek myth who was condemned to reach for someone who was always escaping him but could never quite get away?

No, not one of Keats' rhapsodies on the ancient world. The words running through my mind now came from a later, more disturbing bard, Yeats:  
  
Turning and turning in the widening gyre  
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;  
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;  
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,  
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  
The ceremony of innocence is drowned ...  
  
I shivered. We had seen enough, in the past few years, of the death of innocence and the blood-dimmed tide, and of anarchy and madness.

Was I the falcon or the falconer?

Did I have to be either of them?

And if I did not take one of those roles, controller or controlled, would it avert the anarchy and the blood, or would things still fall apart?

***

"You're pretty quiet."

"Sorry. I think I'm going to make some tea; you want any?" I reached for the little billy kettle and the bag of Lapsang Souchong tea leaves. The good thing about Lapsang Souchong was that it was already sort of smoked, so that when it was brewed over a fire it actually improved.

"No, thanks. That stuff still tastes like essence of tarred rope to me."

"It's an acquired taste, like smoked meat or fish or cheese." I poured enough water from the jug for one cup and set it to boil on the embers. "I'm still thinking about today."

"And?"

"It can't just be me and my attitude causing the problem," I said slowly. "Maybe, if I'm using that voice, you have to treat me as if I don't matter. Block me out of your consciousness, or something like that. Every time when you've had problems you've had your senses wide open on me, haven't you?"

"Well, yeah," Jim said, poking the edge of the fire with a stick, far enough away that it didn't affect the little kettle. "I tend to focus on you a lot, Chief."

"Maybe you shouldn't, as much. Maybe it ties you too close to me, and this is some kind of corrective measure."

Jim's hand came to rest on the back of my neck, not heavily. "You're not saying you want distance at any other time, are you?"

"God, no." I shook my head, and leaned into the warm hand rubbing my neck. "I'm not even sure I want any distance at all, but maybe this is the universe telling you that you don't have to hover quite as much when I can take care of myself?"

"You make it sound like I'm some cartoon character or other, like one of the Gargoyles, or maybe the Tick," Jim complained, his fingers entwined in my hair.

"Since when do you even know about the Gargoyles?" I lifted the boiling pot off the embers and tipped in a teaspoon or so of leaves, then set the lid on so it would steep. "It's not like you watch Saturday morning television."

"Reruns, late night, when you're out with your friends. And sometimes I flip past them when I'm checking the Weather Channel. Some of them are pretty good," he admitted.

"Well, I'll make you a deal, Ellison. I won't put you into a bright blue muscle suit if you don't stick me in a moth outfit that looks like a kid's footie sleepers, okay?"

"Deal." He pulled me in for a one-armed hug, which I returned, then let go enough for me to pour the steeped tea into a mug. "So we've got more tests to run tomorrow, right?"

"Two-way ones, this time. You observe me, I observe you."

"How about a little personal observation tonight?"

"That's distinctly possible -- after I finish the tea, of course."

"Of course."

The fire crackled, and Jim put another couple of chunks of wood on it so it would blaze up again. Over the broken ridgepole of the roof I could see the Milky Way curving across the sky, a river of stars that flowed from one horizon to the other, spattering constellations in its path with tiny sparkles against the velvet darkness.

"You think we're getting too close, Chief?"

"Did I say that?"

"You were thinking it."

"Oh, now you can read my thoughts." Keep it light, I told myself.

"Sometimes I can, sometimes I can't." He toyed with a damp branch, using it as a poker to rearrange the glowing coals. "It's more like reading the emotions in your body and figuring out what thoughts they're related to."

Of course he could do that. He could read my blood pressure from a block away, or listen to my stomach gurgle, or any of a dozen other less appetizing noises. Sometimes there was a distinct down side to being the partner of the Human Crime Lab.

"If this is your way to tell me there's not enough room in that tent for both of us, forget it."

"No way, partner." A grin flashed at me. "I'm just trying to catch up with wherever you're going with this."

"Okay." I took a deep breath.

The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

Mere anarchy is loosed ...

"I think sometimes you forget that I'm a trained cop now. You keep checking on me as if I'm still that grad student who bluffed his way into the exam room at the hospital."

"And bluffed his way out of a kidnapping with a flare gun." The corner of Jim's mouth twitched into a grin.

I gulped. Truth time. "That wasn't a bluff. Well, not entirely."

"Desert Storm, Chief?"

"That part was the bluff. The part about flying Apaches wasn't."

"But they only let you fly Apaches -- "

"If you're in the military. Yeah. I sort of was, for about three months, long enough to get through Basic and learn to fly a bit, until they found out that I'd faked my medical exam to get in."

Jim was staring at me now, his jaw dropping. "I shouldn't be surprised at this, but I am. What else have you been holding out on me? You did pass the exam for the Academy, didn't you, or did you finesse that one too?"

"I went by the book on that one," I assured him. "There's no physical reason for me not to be your partner on the job. I met all the criteria. I just didn't meet all of them a few years ago."

"What was it? Eyesight?"

I shrugged. "Partly that. The rest was a minor heart murmur they found. Maybe Naomi was right about the effects of meditation on healing or something; they didn't find it when I had the Academy physical, so maybe it's gone now."

His reaction was so easy to predict. He held his breath for a moment, listening. When he nodded, judiciously, I didn't say a word. What was left to say? I'd just been checked out by the best, and found whole.

"And where was Naomi during all this?" He leaned back on his elbow, watching me.

"A meditation retreat in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, I think. Way up near Iceland or the other northern islands. Somewhere isolated, where she wouldn't hear the evening news. She thought I was on an exchange program at the Sorbonne, and then on a dig in Mexico. I had it arranged with a couple of friends that they'd remail from Paris or Mexico any letters I sent for her." I shrugged. "If she'd actually asked me what I was doing, I wouldn't have been able to lie to her, but I didn't have to tell her if she didn't ask."

Jim still had this slightly befuddled look on his face. "I've got to say, you're about as unmilitary a guy as I've ever met. Why'd you even try?"

"Forbidden fruit, man. Don't tell me you never got a lecture and didn't go off to do exactly what you'd been warned against."

"Oh, yeah." Jim rolled over on his back to stare at the stars. "My old man was about as thrilled with the military as Naomi was, especially after some of the mess in 'Nam. He wanted me to grow up to rule the military-industrial complex, not serve it. But that's a long time ago, Chief."

"Another country." I sipped my cooling tea, and thought about how our different pasts had brought us to where we were now.

"Yeah. So, what did you think of the Army?"

I smiled. "It had its good points, but I figured out soon enough that I couldn't be all I wanted to be if I stayed in, so I didn't fight the discharge. I was back at Rainier by summer session, and the only difference Naomi noticed when she came to visit was that my hair was shorter. I told her I'd gotten part of it burned off in a chem lab accident and trimmed the rest to match, and she was all right with that."

"You're a never-ending source of surprises, Blair." He sounded a little hurt. "Why didn't you tell me before?"

"I don't like to talk about failures, and that felt like one." I put down my empty cup. The last of the tea had left a bitter taste in my throat.

"You're not a failure. Don't let anyone tell you differently." Jim pulled me down next to him on the dusty wooden floor and kissed my forehead.

"So, you think you can loosen up a little on the 'protect the Guide' bit when you need to?"

"I think I'm going to have to re-evaluate my whole approach to dealing with you. You're a lot tougher than I thought."

"More tests and observations?"

"Absolutely." His hand was already unbuttoning my shirt.

***

"Let's do some warm-ups," I said the next morning, sprinkling toasted wheat germ over the bowl of oatmeal and topping it with cinnamon.

Jim reached for the cinnamon and passed me the tea billy. "I could chase you around the clearing a few times," he offered.

"I meant sense warm-ups. Distance things. How far can you see and hear, and so on."

"Okay." He closed his eyes. "I'm assuming you want me to filter out all the local stuff, right?" He went still for a moment, his spoon motionless in his own bowl of oatmeal (topped with cinnamon and brown sugar.) "Wind, in feathers. Up there." Without opening his eyes he pointed to a speck floating over the next mountain's rocky slope.

"That's a couple of miles, at least, not counting altitude. What is it?"

Jim opened his eyes. I saw him follow the sound with his eyes, and focus. "Might not be that far away; it's medium-sized, with pointed wings. No, there's another, same kind."

"Any distinguishing marks?"

"Dusty blue back, and some kind of marking on the head near the eyes." He drew a kind of letter J in the air with his fingers. "Any ideas, Chief?"

"They might be peregrine falcons. Wow." It was hard to walk the line between excitement and scientific examination of data sometimes. "Now, try for something close. How microscopic can you go?"

"Let's not get carried away there, Einstein. Don't you want to try for distance on smell, or can I just finish my breakfast? I can tell you right now, there's something a few days dead about a mile off upwind, and I really don't want to find out anything more about it."

"I think that's just about enough information there." I washed my oatmeal down with tea. "Here. What do you see in this?" I pointed the mug at a rough chunk of stone in the fireplace, clean enough to notice as it was out of the way of the smoke.

"Rainbows, on fracture lines inside the rock. Must be some quartz crystals in it. There, and there." He ran his fingers over the surface. "Probably a small vein of quartz, but it's not clear. Pinkish?"

"Rose quartz? That's really good, Jim."

He shrugged, pleased. "Now I'll have to come up with something really interesting to use to test you."

"Ooo. Should I be scared?"

"Very scared."

***

None of it worked.

Not once.

I aimed energy at trees, rocks and brush. I got mad and pushed it at a squirrel, which climbed up a nearby tree until it was ten feet over my head and scolded me loudly. I spoke softly, loudly, sweetly, harshly, and it didn't matter.

As long as I was using voice, he was ill.

We stopped after only half an hour. I insisted. He was sitting on the ground, leaning back against a tree, looking as if he was just about to recycle his oatmeal.

"Enough, Jim. I'll just stop using it."

"No." The voice wasn't strong, but the tone was adamant. "You wouldn't let me give up on my senses when they were hard to manage. I won't let you give this up."

"It's not worth you getting sick whenever I use it."

"I don't get sick every time you use it."

I crouched next to him and offered him a sip from the water bottle I'd brought along. He rinsed his mouth.

"Let's look at this the other way," I suggested. "What was happening when it didn't bother you? Were there any common elements?"

Jim stared at the tops of the trees, floating in the breeze. I shivered. How were we going to manage back in the real world when we couldn't do it here?

"Emergencies. Life and death situations."

"With the dog, yeah."

"And when you came home from the hospital." His eyes met mine. "If you hadn't wanted to stay, it would have killed me."

"I know." It didn't matter whether he was exaggerating or not. It was still the truth.

"So the emotions are straightforward. You're trying to protect someone."

"Right," I said. "And when I'm in an interview room, I'm trying to attack someone, emotionally speaking. I'm cutting away at their defenses."

"Maybe that's why it feels so bad inside, as if you're doing something that's tearing you apart."

"Even when it's not?"

"Even when it's not."

"Hunh." I had to think about this for a moment. "That's too simple. It can't be all of it."

"Part of it, then." Jim pushed himself up to sit on a fallen tree trunk, scowling.

"You all right?" I glanced around for anthills, or other irritants, but saw none.

"You were at Rainier for how long? More than a decade, right? When did you start teaching?"

I had to think about it. "Third year of grad work, but I was proctoring exams for undergrads before that."

"What about in the spring, the year after Desert Storm?"

"Oh, yeah. Let me see, I was proctoring Anthro 101, Philosophy 237 and 430. I needed more cash for my car, so I picked those up at the last minute." The memory zinged into place, and my jaw dropped open. "You were there. The prison escapee, what was his name -- "

"Roland Ryan. Busted out of prison, stole a car, headed north and crashed the car on campus --"

"And took over the top floor of the women's dorm, next to the old science building." It had been a beautiful spring day, warm and fragrant, until you noticed the barricade of police cars encircling the dorm, and the grim-faced policemen hunkered behind them with rifles. "Ryan didn't take hostages, though, did he? He was pretty good about that."

The whole story was coming back to me now. Ryan had crashed his car about 5 a.m. on the Monday of finals week. He'd climbed into the dorm through a first-floor bathroom window, then had gone to the fourth floor, grabbed the first girl he'd encountered, and told her to get everyone out because he didn't want a bloodbath when the cops arrived. She'd done it, going from room to room and hustling the other girls out of the building as quickly as possible.

"He had one hostage, Chief. The resident assistant." Jim shook his head. "She wasn't fast enough to get away from him, and he set himself up in her room on the corner."

"I thought you were in Vice then."

"They called in every available cop, and I'd just come in from a boring stakeout. I wanted the action, believe me." He gave me a mild smile, the one that looks so misleading. "I told them I could take him out from inside the building and they told me to go ahead."

"Ranger background." It figured. Give Jim Ellison a hostage to rescue, and he turns into Lancelot. Not Galahad; Jim's never been that noble. Read Le Morte D'Arthur and look at the body count Lancelot racks up, doing the right thing; historical chivalry has never been kind or gentle. "Alone, right?"

"I had backup, but I went in first, through the tunnels. Where were you when all this went down?"

"Me?" I didn't even have to think. "I'd gotten in early, so I was walking back and forth on the third floor of Drummermead, giving the Philosophy 237 final for Marian Brown. Critical thinking. It was an oral, multiple-choice final, and I had to read all the questions and repeat them if anyone didn't hear them right. Weird method of giving an exam, but that's what the prof wanted and it worked." I remembered the sweet scent of early lilacs drifting in from the bushes behind the dorm, and the annoying quacking of the bullhorns outside as the police tried to negotiate with Ryan in words just enough distorted that I couldn't understand them. Any other day, I'd have closed the windows to cut the noise, but I couldn't expect the students to sit two-hour exams in a hot, closed building. "It was just before 8:30 or so, and I was at the bottom of the first page of questions, when the bullets started to ricochet in through the window and bounce off the blackboard about a foot away from me."

"Ryan showed up at the window and one of the hotshots from SWAT tried to take him out." Jim shook his head. "I'd snuck up the back stairs and I was coming through the hall with Finney behind me, and out of nowhere I heard this voice, yelling, 'Down on the floor!'"

"That was me," I admitted. "I don't think I've been as scared since, except for falling out of airplanes in Peru and things like that."

"You sounded like you were right next to me and knew what was going on, so I dropped to my belly -- and Ryan shot over my head and clipped Finney in the arm. But he had to turn away from the girl to do it, and I took him down with my shot, and got the girl out." He shook his head. "You saved my life, Chief, and we hadn't even met yet."

I blinked, trying to take this in. "I can't believe it."

"Believe it."

"It's crazy. I mean, I know you're probably right. I was there. I had to get those students out of their chairs before they all got shot. I was responsible for them. You know how it is."

"Yeah. I know how it is. What happened after that?"

"After that?" I shrugged. "I told them not to cheat and we finished the exam on the floor."

"You finished the exam?"

"We had to, Jim. That was the only time we could schedule it. Besides, we were there, we couldn't leave, and we didn't have anything else to do."

"So maybe you were using voice on me back then without knowing it. You might've been using it on everyone."

"But only in emergencies."

Jim nodded, as if it all made sense to him now. "So you'll have to think of the victims when you question the suspects."

"Sure. Yeah. Right. How the hell am I supposed to do that?" I hadn't realized my voice was getting louder until he winced. "Fine. If I'm questioning some wife beater or child molester, no problem. But I just can't feel protective about some of these guys. That mobster who drowned got what he deserved, accidental or not, Jim. I know you feel the same about that."

"Do you?" Jim's eyebrows rose. He pushed himself up and headed downhill toward the cabin, his shoulders set in that 'don't mess with me' pose that I never believe. I stretched my legs and caught up with him, four strides to his three, and as I drew even, he said without looking at me, "We're supposed to bring them in, not judge them. That's not our job, Sandburg. It doesn't matter if the guy was a garden-variety mobster or a saint, he didn't die of old age. He died because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that makes it our business."

"Wait a minute." I grabbed his arm and he swung around hard, stopping himself before his hand touched my shirt. "Are you telling me that you're going to get all the interrogations that have ambiguous circumstances now, and I only get the righteous ones? Are we talking permanent white hat and black hat delineation here, Jim? Because if that's the situation, I don't like it a bit."

"You're jumping to conclusions, as usual." Jim was gritting his teeth; I could almost see the waves of headache floating off his head like heat waves off summer roads. "White hat, black hat. That's just another judgment call. And you know it's up to Simon to decide who questions who about what."

"Bullshit. You have as much say as Simon does about who questions someone on one of your cases." But in the back of my mind I was hearing Simon talk about not being able to give free rein any more to the one man who could always get confessions, and knowing who he was.

"What, you think I'm going to scare it out of them? You want a turn as big bad cop? Any time, Chief, any time, if you think you can manage it."

"Oh, I can manage it." The words flew out before I could think. "I scared you, didn't I?"

It hit him like a slap, and his face whitened. He pulled away from me and continued downhill, pushing through the brush as if he were a freight train on a straight run. I stood still, watching him go, and felt the conversation turn on its heel and smack me upside the head.

Or maybe in the heart.

This wouldn't be an easy apology, but it would be one I'd have to make and soon.

I followed him down the hill, my stomach churning and my heart in my throat.

***

When I got to the bottom of the hill, what seemed like an hour later, Jim was standing like a tree, watching the campsite from the woods, sniffing the air. He put out one hand to the side, a small gesture that normally would tell me to get behind him.

Something smelled rank, greasy and hot and strange. If I could smell it, how much stronger was it for Jim?

"We're downwind from him. He won't notice us unless we move," he muttered, barely above the whisper of leaves around us.

Only then did I see the large slice of night that was backing out of our tent, snuffling at the places where we'd sat by the fire last night, flipping over the clean cooking pots with a paw sporting claws the size of my fingers.

"Young male, probably a couple years old. We hold still, he'll get tired of checking the place over and go away," Jim said.

The bear reared up and sniffed curiously at the air again, went down on all fours, rolled over to the tree where Jim had strung up the food, and went up on strong back legs again. It reached up to bat at the food duffel as if it were a pinata.

The hell with this.

Simon had told me, essentially, that if I couldn't get the voice power under control, he'd break up Jim's and my partnership, for Jim's own good. Now I couldn't even say what I thought without kicking Jim in the guts, never mind using voice energy on him.

The bear caught the edge of a claw on the duffel's stitching and pulled at it. He was big, as tall as Jim, though probably not as heavy as he would be later in the year, and black as a nightmare, with a long brown snout and a mobile nose. He grunted and reached up with the other paw to steady the bag, and tried to rip at the seam.

I wasn't going to lose my dinner to that oversized floor covering on legs, even if it did have four-inch claws. Without thinking, I picked up two broken branches, one in each hand, and stepped out around Jim.

"Hey!" I threw my arms up and waved the branches to make myself look as big and fierce as possible, and advanced on the bear as if I had Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone beside me. "Get the hell out of there, you! Gaaaah!" My voice went as deep and loud as it could, and I threw everything I had at the animal. "Go away! Bad bear! No chocolate! Get the fuck out of here, rag rug!"

The bear swiveled and stared at me, and the whites of its eyes showed as it started to back away. One claw was still stuck in the bag; when that paw pulled back, the rope broke and the bag fell hard onto the bear's head.

I kept moving forward, waving the branches. "Go on, furball. Get out of here! Yaaaaaaah!"

The bear shook its head, clearly a little dizzy from being hit by the bag. I had a hunch it had encountered some of the canned goods and didn't appreciate the experience. It let go of the bag, which, thankfully, had stayed in one piece, and backed away. "Ay-ee-ay-ee-ay!" I gave a Xena-style war cry, and that was the last straw. The bear threw me a look that plainly said it wanted no part of this insanity, and tried to lope off with some dignity into the woods to look for an easier meal. Unfortunately for its dignity, one foot went up to the ankle into the latrine pit behind the tree, and it yelped disgustedly and kept going, shaking its paw with distaste.

I watched it go, and only lowered my tired arms when it couldn't be heard in the brush any more.

"Do you have any idea how stupid that was?" Jim's voice said from about three inches behind me.

"I'm sure you're going to tell me."

"I'm not going to waste my time. What gave you the idea that you'd get away with it?"

"Jim," I said, tossing the branches toward the woodpile, "everything else has gone wrong today, but I've never batted a thousand at anything. Given how badly I've fucked it all up, that had to go right. It was just a matter of probability."

"For a social scientist, you're a lousy statistician, but I'm not going to argue with you about it." He cracked a smile. "You threw a lot of energy at that bear, didn't you? And none of it hurt me a bit."

"Whoa. It worked?"

"It worked, Einstein. What were you defending?"

I faked a cough that turned into a real one and continued until Jim thumped me on the back. "Well, if you really want to know, I was defending the package of Mallomars."

He threw back his head and laughed. "I can see it now I'm going to have to carry one or two of them on me from now on, or else."

"No way, man. Besides, you can take care of yourself."

"Oh? And what was I going to defend myself with?" He turned around, looking at me over his shoulder. No pistol in the belt, or at the back of his waist, or under his arm. "My teeth? My charming personality?"

My jaw dropped open. His sidearm had been in the tent, just as mine had, next to the shotgun. Neither of us had put them on this morning, as we'd figured that they'd be unnecessary until we went into town. The only 'weapon' we had between us was the jackknife in my pocket.

"Just don't try that little maneuver on a female bear, Blair. There's no way to know where her cubs are." He cuffed the side of my head affectionately and I ducked away, a move I'd perfected in the last few years.

"Right. Baby bears get the Mallomars. No problem. Oh, man." My knees felt a little wobbly at the thought. I headed toward the tent to see what remained of my clothes and sleeping bag.

***

As we cleared up the mess left by the bear -- which wasn't that bad, considering how it could have been -- I turned the last two days over in my mind. I knew I had to be missing something, something vital.

I'd gone over grounding. Fountaining. Perceiving.

Whoa.

Where was Jim in all this?

Coaching me. Checking how I was doing.

Neither of us had thought to check how he was doing, how he maneuvered energy.

I straightened up in the tent and banged my head on one of the light plastic support rods, and my hair looped around it. Great. Now I needed a hat to shield me from the underbrush in the tent, let alone outdoors.

Wait a minute. I wasn't the only one who could move energy.

I could feel the hair knotting around one of those plastic or vinyl clips that held the support rod in place.

What else was in that class Naomi had taken so long ago? Grounding, centering, shielding...

My hair still wouldn't come undone. I gave it an experimental tug.

"Owwww! Shit!"

Shielding. We hadn't done anything about shielding.

Jim could do that. He could learn to do it. He just didn't know that he could.

I tried to pull it a little harder, but neither the clip nor the hair would budge.

"Ouch! Oh, fuck. Owww."

We'd given a new dimension to the blind leading the blind; I could see it now. If Jim could see the energy I used, could he perceive his own?

He probably didn't even know he could use energy at all, for this or for anything else. Maybe he thought what I did was just a Guide thing, the way his senses were a Sentinel thing. Or a game, the way he'd been catching energy clusters and pitching them back at me.

Oh, this would be fun. Later. After my hair had stopped being intimate with Jim's new tent.

"What're you doing in there, Sandburg, rebuilding the place?"

"Very funny, detective. Looking for bear cubs, of course."

If I didn't get it loose soon, I'd have to sleep standing up. And eat. And --

"Maybe I'd better come in and help you look." Jim slid through between the tent flaps, his shoulders big in the confined space. He snickered. "No baby bears here, though there's a Blair- skin rug trap, I see."

"Very funny. C'mon. Help me get this tent out of my hair before it gives me a bald spot."

His fingers moved gently on my scalp, disentangling the strands from the plastic clip around the rod. "I thought you didn't mind bald spots."

"On you, man, on you. Bald is so not my look. Oh, shit, why does my hair get caught in things worse now than it did when it was longer?" I tried to move away and was pulled up short by the grip it still had on my scalp.

"Calm down, Einstein. You'll still have a lot of hair when this is done. Hold still." He kept working, too slowly, and I tapped a foot, the only body part I could move without it affecting my head. "And you thought I was impatient in the bullpen last week."

"You were a pain in the butt in the bullpen. You always get that way when you're frustrated." He'd been so annoyed by the lack of leads on the case that he'd even snapped at the donut girl; if I hadn't calmed things down, Simon would have sent him home like a bad six-year-old. "I thought you'd outgrown that kind of behavior by now."

"Oh, so now that you're a detective you can tell me how to work a case?" Jim's tone was almost academic. If I hadn't been otherwise occupied in trying not to emulate his hairline, I would've applauded his Professor Sandburg imitation.

"No, I'm going to teach you how not to get frustrated so easily."

He patted my head. It didn't hurt. "Speak for yourself. You can move now, by the way."

"Jim -- "

"Of course, since I'm senior detective here, I have to check out the crime scene myself and make sure the damage has been inventoried." He sniffed at my neck. "Hmm. No sign of bear damage here." He nibbled on my ear and started unbuttoning my shirt with a practiced ease. "Or here."

"Jim, you're not paying attention. I'm trying to tell you something."

"I'm not?" He was kneeling on the lumpy pile of sleeping bags, nuzzling my chest and belly, humming to himself a little as he started to unzip my jeans. "You don't think this is paying attention?"

I knew what he was doing. He'd found a way to apologize for blowing me off earlier, in the clearing, and my acceptance of him would be my apology for what I'd said in the first place.

"It -- it's fine." The zipper was open. "Great. Wonderful." He was nuzzling lower, breathing hot, damp air on my boxers. I felt my root chakra opening like a lotus, throbbing warm and red. I'd have to remember to tell him about chakras sometime. Chakras could be very important in energy work. "But -- "

"I heard you already. You're going to teach me not to be frustrated. I think," Jim said as his fingertips pulled the boxers down below my interested cock, "that I already know a little about that."

The air in the tent felt cold against my skin. Of course it did; it was in the shade of two trees, as well as the remaining walls of the cabin. And I should have been freezing, standing with my shirt open and my jeans at my knees and my boxers following them. But just above the boxers Jim was striking the match for another bonfire with his tongue, just rough enough to make my skin ripple up and down my spine, licking me into shape. I caught my breath, rested a hand on his shoulder to keep from falling over, and gave myself over to his investigation.

I'd think later. Much later, when there was enough blood in my brain.

***

"You were saying, Chief?"

We were horizontal, flopped any which way over the sleeping bags and each other. The sun was hitting the top of the tent now, and the air inside was starting to heat up. It would be uncomfortable soon if we didn't go outside and open the ventilation flaps, but I felt too limp and satiated to move.

"Um." It was hard to think while his fingers played in my hair, any of my hair. "What makes you think this voice energy I've been using is a Guide phenomenon?"

"Because you're doing it." Jim's eyebrows knitted together and he lifted his head from my chest. "Wait a minute."

"You played with those energy balls, too, Satchel Paige. Remember?"

He rolled over onto his stomach and leaned his chin on his arm, watching me. "So you're saying this isn't a Guide thing at all."

"Jim, it's not even a Blair thing. Naomi can do it. Lots of people can do it. They teach it at little esoteric conferences and big expensive New Age weekends all over the country." I drew a breath. "And that's not all. There's a lot more you could do with it than I could, because you can see the energy way better than I ever can."

"How do you know it's there, then, if you don't see it?"

"I sense it." I shrugged. "It's one of those things that sort of falls through the definitional cracks, but it's there."

"Okay, Chief. Suppose I can do more with it. Any ideas about what?" He cracked a heart- melting grin. "You're not expecting me to throw energy balls at the next bank robber or crackhead we run across, are you?"

"No, but you can defend yourself with energy. You can build an energy shield, and the side effects of my using voice should just hit the shield and bounce off, or be absorbed by it. You shouldn't even be affected."

"But I'd be able to control it, right?"

I nodded. "If Naomi can do it, you can do it." I could see the thought of matching Naomi on anything startled him a little but he went with it.

And he was a natural.

I coached him through the same steps I'd taken yesterday, establishing an energy connection to the earth, drawing up energy and moving it through myself like water through a conduit.

"Blair," he said, amazement in his voice, "I can feel it. I can almost see it."

"Good. Now, close your eyes and visualize energy moving around you in a circle, or an egg or globe. It stops all energy that you don't want to have bother you, and it lets through anything you do want. It's not touching you; it's out a few inches beyond the ends of your fingers and it sinks into the ground under your feet."

A small line appeared on his forehead between his eyes, and faded. "All right."

I turned away from him, and aimed as many spiteful thoughts and as much energy as I could muster toward a half-dead tree across the clearing. He'd been leveled by far less energy in the interview room.

"Chief?"

"Yes?"

"Did you just do something?"

"Why?"

"It felt like I was in a tent during a rainstorm, as if something was hitting the outside of the shield and dripping off." He opened his eyes. "It worked, didn't it?"

"It worked."

"Now, open it up a little, so that you can feel my energy." Jim gave me one of his better bedroom glances. "Not like that, you flirt. You're still shielding yourself, you're not dropping the shield. Just open a window, or a louver or something."

He nodded, and frowned. Nothing happened. "It's not working."

"Don't panic. Close your eyes, look at the shield and tell me what kind of shield you built."

"Blair --"

"Just do it, Jim. Close your eyes, and sense this shield wall you've built. Visualize it. What's it made of? Concrete, wood, canvas, cheese --"

"Cheese?"

"I'm getting hungry."

"Well, it's not cheese. It might be ... glass."

I took a breath. Only Jim Ellison would find a way to make the 'people living inside glass walls' thing real even in the esoteric world. "Think about glass as a substance. When it's molten, it flows into any shape you want. It can be plate glass, or glass bricks, or windows with a million little panes, or fiberglass. It's yours, Jim, you can do what you want with it. Tell it what you want to do."

The full skeptical look, complete with eyebrow, was turned on me. "It's alive?"

"It's energy, Jim. What can be more alive than that?"

"Okay." Jim frowned again. "It's changing. It's darker, but there are openings where there weren't before. I can feel you through them, and I can open them and close them." The line between his eyebrows smoothed out. "It's shifting. God, this feels so familiar. What is it? Can you tell?"

"Let me see what I can sense." Without the Sentinel senses, I'd have to rely on whatever transient impressions my mind came up with. I reached a hand toward him and felt a real charge of energy between us. "You know, I could almost swear it moved."

"It did. Wait a minute. I know what it is."

I could have sworn his voice smiled.

"What?"

"Fiberglass. Or Kevlar. It's woven Kevlar, like a tent."

A bulletproof tent.

Well, that figured. He had to be the only person I knew who actually felt comfortable in Kevlar, anyway, but he'd worn it longer than anyone else I'd ever known, from that pack vest he'd lived in as a Ranger to the body armor at the P.D.

"Shouldn't be a problem for you, then, should it? Sounds like regulation police-issue shielding to me."

"This is regulation?"

"For you, almost certainly."

His eyes lit up. "You know, I almost can't wait to try it out back in Cascade."

"Whoa! Slow down there, Hoss. We are going to do a whole lot more testing before I turn you loose back in the city. If you're not in real control, Simon will have my head in a jar on his desk."

"Okay, okay." But he was grinning now, like a delighted twelve-year-old who'd just discovered the secret of the universe. He took two steps closer and wrapped me up in his arms in a spontaneous hug that felt warm and wonderful and secure, and chuckled quietly to himself.

"What?" I turned in the hug enough to get my arms around him.

"The Kevlar tent just merged with your egg-whatever-it-is." The chuckle sounded just a bit salacious. "You know, Chief, I'm starting to come up with a whole list of tests and experiments we're going to have to do. I think you'll like them."

"No promises until I know what they are, man."

"Well, they start with you getting rid of your clothes -- "

"I think I like them already."

***

The next day, it didn't take Jim's hearing to know Simon was on the way long before he reached the campsite. Something about the rhythmic quality of his swearing sounded almost musical, though I probably wouldn't tell him that until he calmed down. One of the lit profs at Rainier did a study of the rhythms of rap music a couple of years ago, and found that the stresses and sounds of the pieces were very similar to poetic forms like sonnets, odes and even the blank verse of Shakespeare's tragedies.

Simon's theme, expounded in many verses, unrhymed couplets and expostulations, concerned the inherent unreliability of late-model automobiles and the particular ingratitude of his left front tire, which had apparently gotten a hole in it suitable for hiding Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid and the entire Hole in the Wall Gang.

His voice trailed off as he rounded the curve in the driveway and saw what had happened to his cabin. His mouth opened and closed, without words.

"Hey, Simon," I called over to him. "You want some coffee?"

Simon nodded, his eyes never leaving the broken roof beams and the scorched walls.

Jim had been down at the creek, getting water to be filtered for drinking and cooking. He came up the little ridge behind Simon, sized up the situation, and scuffed his feet in the gravel so his arrival wouldn't be a surprise. When he reached Simon, he put down the two five-gallon jerry cans and rested a hand on Simon's shoulder.

"We can rebuild it for you, Simon. Good as new, or better."

"Uh-huh," Simon said. "Any sign of who did it?"

"Probably an accident. No fatalities, though. Let it go, man. We can fix it."

"Yeah. It's just a cabin. It's just -- oh, shit." Simon's face crumpled briefly. "It's where Joan and I made Darryl." His voice dropped.

"Then we'll make it some place you can bring the next lady in your life, all right?"

Simon took a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. "Right. And Ellison? You say one word to anyone about me getting sentimental, and you'll be --"

"Ticketing parked cars at the Stadium during the Jags games." Jim smiled again. "How's that coffee coming?"

"Ready when you are," I said. Rather than wait for Simon to reach the fireside, I poured some coffee into an enameled mug and brought it to him, black with sugar, the way he liked it. "I noticed some nice log houses on the way up here. You can buy make-it-yourself kits these days that can be put up in a weekend, you know."

"And how do you know so much about construction, Sandburg?"

"Hey, I had Tinkertoys and Lincoln Logs and Erector Sets when I was a kid."

"You're still a kid, as far as I'm concerned."

"No, I'm a detective, as far as you're concerned."

"That too." Simon drained his mug and smiled hopefully. "And I suppose there's some chance I might have two detectives back at work on Monday?"

"I'd say there's a very good chance," Jim said.

Simon gave him the don't-mess-with-me look. "You're not just saying this to make me feel better?"

"Simon, have I ever said anything just to make you feel better?" Jim asked.

"Yes. You told me life would get better after the divorce."

"And?"

"It took its own sweet time." By this time they had reached the fireplace, and Simon refilled and doctored his own coffee. "Pretty intelligent way to set things up. I'm glad the fireplace is still working."

"I wouldn't bet on the flue. There's an old bird nest in there someplace."

"We might be able to make the new cabin around the old fireplace," I offered, "if the measurements match."

"Good idea, Sandburg. Now," Simon's voice shifted into his Captain Banks persona, "tell me what's going on with Jim's senses. Did you two manage to work out your problems?"

Jim and I exchanged glances, and replied in a singsong unison, "Yes, Captain Banks."

"Is it going to work in town?"

"Yes, Captain Banks."

Simon's stonefaced attempt at seriousness was cracking badly. "Do I want to know how you did it?"

"Probably not, Captain Banks."

"Enough." He held up a hand. "I'm glad you're in such a good humor about this now. It wasn't funny at all at the station a few days ago. What made the difference?"

"Kevlar, a bear, and Mallomars." I said.

"And the tent getting attached to your curly head, Harpo," Jim said.

Simon groaned. "I really don't want to hear this on an empty stomach."

***

A week later, Simon was still nervous as hell. He insisted on living in the observation room while we went into the interview room with Ulrich Verhorst, a slimeball who had felt no particular compunction about hacking his landlady to pieces when she stopped him to demand his two-months-overdue rent. He'd been caught in the act, and his only way out of the worst kind of prison time was to deal with us on other information we wanted. However, he'd never talked to anyone about anything before -- in fact, there'd been conjecture among the uniforms that he'd taken too hard a blow to the larynx when he was younger, and couldn't really speak at all.

Jim stood behind Verhorst, leaning his shoulders against a side wall at enough of an angle to float menacingly in the man's peripheral vision. He watched Verhorst with his eyes narrowed, cat watching prey, as if he'd really like to take him apart, play with the pieces and figure out just what made him tick.

In contrast, I sat across from Verhorst in a chair, my glasses on my nose and my file folder in my hand, turning pages and asking questions quietly, as if I had all the time in the universe. Verhorst ignored me, shrugged off the questions, and stared at the mirrored glass as if he could eyefuck whoever was on the other side. As far as he was concerned, I didn't exist.

I glanced at Jim; he nodded.

I dropped my voice a little lower, made it a little sweeter, and put some persuasive energy into it. "You realize, if you tell us what you know about Jerry Glickman, we might be able to take it to the District Attorney."

Glickman owned a series of sleazy hotels, where he ran his prostitutes hot and cold, day and night. Major Crime had had information for years that Glickman was involved as a fence in half a dozen of the most costly thefts in the past few years, but witnesses tended to disappear when needed, and there'd never been enough physical or circumstantial evidence to indict him. About all anyone had been able to do was to bust the hookers and pimps, though we'd never been able to substantiate the link between them and him.

"You'd cut me a deal?" Verhorst's squinty eyes met mine for the first time. His voice sounded scratchy, like old burlap in a wind.

I said, carefully, "I can't promise you anything, but it wouldn't hurt your case if you cooperated, and it might help you a lot." Jim nodded again, moving his head about one millimeter. "Tell me what you know about Glickman's business."

I'd started at ten percent; I was up to twenty-five percent, and Jim was showing no ill effects.

Verhorst's eyes narrowed, and he frowned. He appeared to be thinking -- probably an unfamiliar exercise -- and he rubbed his nose on the back of his arm. When he leaned forward with his arms on the table and his hands open, and started to spill times, dates, places and names, I let him talk, spinning it out. It was all being taped, and the more he talked, the more he might say something useful.

Jim recrossed his arms, and tapped his fingers against his elbow. I took the hint and asked more detailed questions, leaned in when Verhorst tried to dodge and cranked up the power to forty percent, keeping a weather eye on my partner as I did it.

No storms. Not even a cloud in his eyes.

The corners of Jim's mouth turned up in a small, triumphant smile. He mouthed, "Go for it," and I did, pinning down the facts and extracting the suppositions and the who-did-what-to-whom as if I were examining a particularly dense anthro major who hadn't studied for his oral comps.

An hour later, we left Verhorst in the room with his third cup of coffee -- he'd gotten thirsty, talking so much, and he'd certainly earned it -- while his information was being transcribed and readied for his signature. If all went well, we'd be able to take down most of Glickman's business with what Verhorst had given us.

Simon was jubilant, high-fiving us as soon as his office door was closed. "You did it, Sandburg. Have a cigar. How are you feeling, Jim?"

"Never better, sir." Jim grinned. He put the cigar away, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a small roundish package that he tossed at me. I caught it in midair.

"What's that?" Simon asked.

"My good-luck charm," Jim told him. I unwrapped the Mallomar and bit into it, and he pulled out a second for himself. "You know, I might even get to like these things," he added, to me, "at least as long as you're defending them."

"You just make sure you have your own," I said.

Jim grinned. "Chief, after all this time I think I know better than to get between you and the, um, object of your desire."


End file.
